UPDATE: I did "pull the plug" and bought a 3 user license of Nisus Writer Pro. Much of what I experienced was due to operator error and lack of a good understanding of how the software works. Several members here really helped out as you will read below...

I'm about ready to pull the plug but I don't know what other options I have. I'm writing a book–my 5th– and I've used Word and Pages on Mac in the past. Both of these have bogged down with simple things like captions on images constantly going missing, and lots of other layout issues. I was hoping Nisus would be better.

My books are typically 150pgs and 11x8.5" format. I do use lots of images, an average of 50 per book. I like to include sidebars as text blocks inline in the text near where the sidebar thought is relevant. I like these sidebars to have a light colored background to match the rest of the book design. Single column text. TOC, the basics, not rocket science.

I've been using the Nisus demo to test what it can do with my next book and for the most part I've been very happy with the features. I've typed and partially formatted about 50 pages with 15 sidebars and 18 images with captions. I also use several bullet list styles and number lists in the text.

I have been having all sorts of layout issues where the software seems to go haywire and number everything in my document. I also have an odd situation that when I try to use small caps on "fff" it sometimes works and sometimes does it partially. Very odd this one.

But the BIG issue I have is maintaining my layout for text - images - sidebars. Seems like any little thing I do causes the images and sidebars to jump to odd places and it is time consuming and difficult to repair.

Some of this might be operator error but these are the same sorts of issues I have with Pages and I have tried a lot of different options for anchoring, etc.

Initially I tried using Text blocks for my sidebars with a light blue background. Formatting the blocks so they are a consistent width-the width of my page-is a bit of a challenge. The margin fields for the block don't always correspond to the actual page margins so I have to position by hand. Using the mouse to drag sometimes works but often causes the block to jump to another page. Very odd. I ended up abandoning using text blocks and now just insert my sidebars inline where I want them using a different face. I use a rectangle object with a blue fill and position it behind the text. I have to manually align these and even though I try to anchor to the sidebar text/paragraph itself, the anchor doesn't stay put. Every time I touch the file, a few of these boxes will move up or down a little (say 2 lines or so) and throw the layout off.

I've had more than one occasion where i've had to revert to an earlier version simply to recover from some very odd auto-reformat/layout issues.

It's driving me nuts so I thought I see if any experts here who understand what I'm seeing might have some best practices or other advice for what I'm trying to do.

Are there any ways of "purging" a Nisus file to remove cruft and stuff that might creep into it? I had written a utility for Pages 09 that did this - cleaned out unused styles, etc - and that helped a lot.

cheers,Michael

Author:

mhackney [ 2017-02-25 14:47:45 ]

Post subject:

Re: Lot's of formatting issues

Also, when I rebuild the TOC I get chap 3, 4, 5, 6 and appendix 1 & b duplicated at the end of the TOC! This ones new, I haven't had this happen before.

Author:

phspaelti [ 2017-02-25 19:18:52 ]

Post subject:

Re: Lot's of formatting issues

Hello Michael,I'm sorry to hear you are having such a hard time.

mhackney wrote:

Initially I tried using Text blocks for my sidebars with a light blue background. Formatting the blocks so they are a consistent width-the width of my page-is a bit of a challenge. The margin fields for the block don't always correspond to the actual page margins so I have to position by hand. Using the mouse to drag sometimes works but often causes the block to jump to another page. Very odd. I ended up abandoning using text blocks and now just insert my sidebars inline where I want them using a different face. I use a rectangle object with a blue fill and position it behind the text. I have to manually align these and even though I try to anchor to the sidebar text/paragraph itself, the anchor doesn't stay put. Every time I touch the file, a few of these boxes will move up or down a little (say 2 lines or so) and throw the layout off.

You are calling these things "sidebars", but you want them to have the full width of the page and margins that match the page? From the sound of this, I wouldn't choose text boxes for this kind of thing. Text boxes are a good idea only for text which should "float" independent of the main text, or overlap the page margins, etc. Of course if you want consistent formatting of floating text boxes (exact width, exact location, etc.) I would suggest to use the control palette and enter numbers. You can select all text boxes at the same time and enter the number(s) and all text boxes will then have the same value. That's a much easier, quicker, and more precise way of getting things to align. But like I said, it sounds like text boxes are the wrong thing for your case

From the sound of it you want borders and/or shading on your sidebar paragraphs. I would recommend using the paragraph formatting options for this rather than trying to draw (floating) rectangles and trying to place them. Floating rectangles will have the same drawbacks as text boxes, plus you need to resize them every time you edit your paragraph.

One further option is to use tables. One cell tables can sometimes be a good option. But since Nisus added paragraph borders and shading, they seem the preferable method.

I am attaching a sample here, that has sidebars using a paragraph style.

Are there any ways of "purging" a Nisus file to remove cruft and stuff that might creep into it? I had written a utility for Pages 09 that did this - cleaned out unused styles, etc - and that helped a lot.

It wouldn't be too hard to write a macro to loop through $doc.allStyles and delete those that are not used. In fact there is a probably a version of this macro somewhere. But if you are familiar with your document, isn't it just as easy to go through the styles in Style View and select the ones you think are not used and hit delete. Nisus will warn you if you try to delete one that is still being used. There are also macros—as well as "no macro" methods—to help you find styles that you thought were no longer being used, but still seem to be in use.

Philip’s “Sidebar sample” file seems to reflect Michael’s description all right, but I’m not sure I would call these “sidebars”. To me, the term is inappropriate for something that is supposed to extend across the full length of a page. I’d call these things “boxouts”. Since we don’t want to get bogged down over terminology, I think it could be useful for Michael to attach a one-page file to show us exactly what he hopes to achieve.

I am wondering whether aspects of our discussion a week or so ago on the topic “Differing Sized Multi-column Pages Change Across Even & Odd” might have some relevance here. There we were dealing with images (possibly with captions) which lay outside the main text margins and hence within what could be construed as a sidebar. Philip’s excellent macro would need to be modified to deal with text boxes. There are ways to color such a sidebar.

I might just say here that, in attempting to extend the functionality of Philip’s macro, I started with standardizing image size. However, although height appears to work OK, width is way off. I’m not sure whether this is a bug or not. Eventually I hoped to examine the vertical placement issue as well. (Too many other things on my plate!) Further discussion of these matters probably belongs in the other thread, but I mention them here because they may have relevance to Michael’s situation.

The jumping around that Michael has experienced is almost certainly due to issues with anchors. I don’t know whether dedicated page layout software uses similar devices, but I suspect that high-end desktop publishing software does things differently. I wonder whether the user experience could be improved by allowing anchors in Nisus Writer to be attached to individual characters (a bit like footnote references) rather than to whole paragraphs. It would be interesting to hear what other people think of this idea and whether it merits “feature request” status.

The problem with small caps may be a function of ligatures in a particular font, so it could be worth looking at a different font and seeing what happens. Perhaps the inconsistency is due to a duplicate font. And it’s always worth seeing whether inconsistent computer behavior persists through a restart.

In case Michael is thinking of abandoning Nisus Writer: We said in the other thread that some projects may require post-production in software other than a word processor. This seems to have been Michael’s experience with other word processors he has used. It’s important to recognize that the main part of a writing project is the manipulation of textual, as opposed to graphical, elements and that this is where a word processor should excel. While Nisus Writer still has some deficiencies (among which I’ll only cite here those relating to text flow between non-contiguous columns and to split-view), its no-nonsense design, extensive feature list, accessible grep, powerful macro language, impressive documentation, interested engineers and helpful forum participants make it, in my opinion, the best choice by far for serious writers on a Macintosh. It might be nice if page layout were a bit easier, but I’m not about to sacrifice any of the other stuff on the altar of page layout. If necessary, I’d look at other do-it-yourself solutions (via PDF or CSS, for example) or I’d hand the project over to a designer with dedicated software. Or I’d revise my design of the project. But I wouldn’t jettison my chosen word processor (whichever it were) on this account.

Cheers,Adrian

Author:

mhackney [ 2017-02-26 08:20:39 ]

Post subject:

Re: Lot's of formatting issues

Thank you both for your thoughtful (and helpful!) replies.

Firstly, sorry for the semantics, I actually did begin attempting to create true sidebars. When I found that they moved around the document causing layout issues in other places I went down the path of putting the text blocks in line with the text (full width) and then ultimately abandoning the blocks altogether and using styled text to mimic what I am after.

Philip's sample should get me to what I want. Note, I am using the construct primarily for "tips" and other text that is not part of the main document flow so I do want some visual distinction but I'm not married to a particular construct (true sidebars, etc) as long as it is visually appealing and doesn't cause overall formatting headaches.

I stripped my document and left just a few pages of the introduction so you can see what I'm trying to do. I used Philip's technique for this "sidebar" and ironically, this one actually has the label sidebar, the majority are "tips" or "soapbox" It was too big to attach so I put a copy in my dropbox and here is the public link:

Adrian, the small caps issue happens on the same font in the document, in some places it works, in others it doesn't but if I copy and paste a "working" one to the bad one, it is fine. But it should be exactly the same font, just an odd thing and only occurs with the "fff" combination.

I actually do enjoy Nisus Writer Pro greatly, I just need to learn it's limitations and how those affect my "creative" layout process. I don't publish ultra high end layouts but I do publish high end content. Most of my work is in the fly fishing "history" and "diy" genres, my publishing company is wwww.reellinespress.com. This new book is a 3D printing book and the first of several as I have other authors lined up. I'm publishing mine first and will create a new press for these.

For me, the creative process is both the textual AND the graphical simultaneously. I absolutely realize this is not how most work but the two are intertwined in my mind. The words in their textual content are just as important as the words in their graphical context. Call me crazy! The "other" high end layout apps have the opposite focus and they are cumbersome on the textual manipulation (i.e. the writing itself) to the point of being unusable for that.

I am not fixated on high end layout capabilities and Nisus Writer has SO much MORE to offer than, dare I say, Pages (even the 09 version pre-evisceration). And I acknowledge a lot has to do with the learning curve. For instance, I had looked for background color and didn't find it. I might not have gone down this path had I known that. As it is, as you can see, I still don't know how to fill that color to the right margin and also provide a little margin around all of the text like Philp's sample. But I see that he pulled it off so I'll keep looking until I find out how to do it!

Adrian, one of your last comments–"Or I'd revise my design of the project."–is exactly where my head is. I just need to be confident that I can layout the document and not be surprised but odd reformatting and other issues later. It's like chasing my tail when that happens exactly because I write and layout/design at the same time!

This is a great forum, thank you.

Author:

adryan [ 2017-02-26 13:36:58 ]

Post subject:

Re: Lot's of formatting issues

G’day, Michael et al

Very quickly on that small caps issue….

A search for “fff” in your document yields no results. A search for “ff” selects only the last two characters of a triplet. Double-clicking on an occurrence of “fff” also selects only the last two characters of a triplet. This behavior suggests that the triplet is not recognized as a single word.

View > Show Invisibles

Gotcha! Interposed gremlins.

Editing > Select > Select All (Cmd-A)Macro > Editing > Zap Gremlins

Correct behavior supervenes.

Why the gremlins were there in the first place is not something I understand, but it could be a function of the font you are using. I see it is ACaslon Pro which is not one I have on my computer and so was substituted. Which does raise the issue of whether the gremlins were inserted during the substitution at my end, but I suspect this is unlikely.

Anyway, see if the above works at your end.

Cheers,Adrian

Author:

mhackney [ 2017-02-26 15:18:17 ]

Post subject:

Re: Lot's of formatting issues

Wow, I learned some new things! Thanks.

I duplicated your steps but after the Gremlins (12 of them I recall) were removed, I still am not able to make all 3 "f" small caps. Take a look at the zoomed in screenshot, it looks like the first one is slightly different from the other two! Yet they are the same font and style. When I double click, all 3 are selected like a word (correct behavior). But applying small caps only affects the last f.

I've even deleted that entire sentence and re-keyed it. I wonder if the "fff" sequence is being treated as a special thing?

It must be the Adobe Caslon Pro font, if I change those 3 characters to any other font it works perfectly. I also see that the sequence ffm also doesn't behave properly - it's the "ff" that seems to be the problem. I suppose I can create a character style and use a different font and small caps to deal with this.

While I have your attention, is there a way to remove unused fonts from the Document Fonts menu?

Author:

mhackney [ 2017-02-26 15:51:23 ]

Post subject:

Re: Lot's of formatting issues

Well, I just purchased a 3 license pack so I can use on my laptop and desktop and have one for my wife too. I feel a lot better today. I think the text box stuff was not a good approach. I couldn't include footnotes for example and I needed to do that. My goal really is to have a place visually distinct from the main body of text to add in tips and rants/raves (well, I call them soapboxes). Philip's approach works fine with a little indent on the left and right. If there were a way to move the outer page margin for these so they could actually extend out in the whitespace like a real sidenote, that would be cool but I like what I have now.

The other thing I'm struggling with is lists. I don't have a good mental model for list styles and how they relate to paragraph styles. I also see I have a thing called "Paragraph Style" and "Normal 1" in my paragraph styles. These are the kinds of things I either don't understand or need to clean out. I created this document by copy/paste from a Pages document. I created styles in Writer to correspond to my Pages styles so when I copied over I could use them.

From a best practices perspective, is it best to use the Normal style for the body text and redefine it with my font/size/style? And anything about bullet and numbered lists best practices would be good. The "final straw" that prompted me to post the original post was my entire document getting numbered - every paragraph - after I tried to create a numbered list with single spacing. I've read the guide but didn't really understand this yet. I'lll re-read that too.

Author:

adryan [ 2017-02-26 20:16:34 ]

Post subject:

Re: Lot's of formatting issues

G'day, Michael et al

Good to hear that you've purchased Nisus Writer. I hope you enjoy using it.

Personally, if I found a font so problematic, I'd switch to another one. But there are ways of addressing the problem if you are otherwise wedded to that particular font.

Presumably you will introduce a gremlin every time you use that ligature. Simply applying a special style will not by itself remove the gremlin. I would create a macro to do the job for me. Quick-and-dirty code might be along these lines:–

Code:

# Zap any gremlins.# Based on code in Nisus Writer's Zap Gremlins macro.

I've chosen Palatino, but you could substitute some other font. The "To Small Caps" command comes from the Edit > Convert menu. If you wanted to, you could add in colors, underlining or anything else that took your fancy.

Duplicate any file in your Nisus Macros folder, replace its contents with the above code, and save it with a recognizable name somewhere appropriate in the Macros folder.

You might run this macro (from the main menu or via a keyboard shortcut) every time you entered the ligature (if you wished to see it in all its new glory immediately), or you might run it when the document is all but complete. Just remember that Find/Replace expressions involving the ligature may not work as expected, depending on the state of the document at the time and your choice of F/R expression.

When it comes to removing unused fonts from the Document Fonts menu, the program should do this automatically. However, when I converted all text in a test document into a single font, the Document Fonts menu still listed some other fonts. I had deliberately ensured that the header and footer contained no stowaways. Mystery! Eventually I discovered that they lurked amongst the styles in the Style Sheet. So there’s a few clues about tidying up that menu. Real rainy-day stuff, in my opinion! (And it doesn’t rain that much where I am!)

I hope all this helps.

Cheers,Adrian

Author:

mhackney [ 2017-02-26 20:30:58 ]

Post subject:

Re: Lot's of formatting issues

I put a fair amount of time into choosing the font for this book and this one was "perfect'. It's an Adobe font so I thought it should be clean. The ONLY issue I've found is this odd combination of "ff" followed by another character. I ended up creating a character style that changes the font to Garamond and small caps. It works perfectly and I don't have to find another font to use!

Author:

phspaelti [ 2017-02-26 23:32:13 ]

Post subject:

Re: Lot's of formatting issues

mhackney wrote:

As it is, as you can see, I still don't know how to fill that color to the right margin and also provide a little margin around all of the text like Philip's sample. But I see that he pulled it off so I'll keep looking until I find out how to do it!

I'm not sure I did anything special here. Paragraph Borders do fall on the "outside" of the paragraph, so at the margin you have to move the text wraps in just a hair.

Attachment:

Para Border and Margin.jpeg [ 28.07 KiB | Viewed 1857 times ]

mhackney wrote:

Note, I [use sidebars] primarily for "tips" and other text that is not part of the main document flow so I do want some visual distinction but I'm not married to a particular construct (true sidebars, etc) as long as it is visually appealing and doesn't cause overall formatting headaches.

I think, considering what you were trying to do, that floating text boxes would have been the obvious choice. But since it also looks like your "tips" can get a bit long this is likely to cause placement issues. A text box is usually attached to the beginning of a paragraph. If the paragraph starts near the bottom of the page, a large text box might not fit, and then Nisus "goes crazy".My recommendation for such cases would be to first create the "tips" inline, as you are doing now, and then use a macro to place them into text boxes once you are ready to print. After running the macro you would then go through the document and adjust the vertical placement and put "strategic" page breaks to help with the placement of the boxes.But as you discovered, text boxes have other drawbacks as well, such as not allowing for footnotes. If you need footnotes in text boxes you will have to use a workaround. See similar discussions for tables, which (spoiler alert) also do not allow footnotes.

mhackney wrote:

My goal really is to have a place visually distinct from the main body of text to add in tips and rants/raves (well, I call them soapboxes). Philip's approach works fine with a little indent on the left and right. If there were a way to move the outer page margin for these so they could actually extend out in the whitespace like a real sidenote, that would be cool but I like what I have now.

The (only) way to do that is to set the margins wider and then move the text-wrap(s) in. If you do this for your Normal style—and have all other styles based on Normal—this should give you some space to let things "stick into the margin". However considering that you are using odd/even pages with unequal margins, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how you would need to set things for everything to come out right.

mhackney wrote:

The other thing I'm struggling with is lists. I don't have a good mental model for list styles and how they relate to paragraph styles. I also see I have a thing called "Paragraph Style" and "Normal 1" in my paragraph styles. These are the kinds of things I either don't understand or need to clean out. I created this document by copy/paste from a Pages document. I created styles in Writer to correspond to my Pages styles so when I copied over I could use them.

A "Normal 1" style is usually the result of a style conflict. There are a number of ways that they come about. You may have copied text from someplace and told Nisus to "Add pasted styles" (rather than "Use existing"). This can happen even if the style you wanted to keep is not the "Normal" and/or the copied bit does not seem to contain the conflicting style. Maybe the copied style is "Based on" a style that conflicts. There are other scenarios that lead to such styles.A "Paragraph Style" usually comes about because you started to define a new style and then perhaps changed what you were doing before your named it. Nisus uses "Paragraph" as the default name for unnamed paragraph styles.You probably want to delete such styles. But you might want to check where they are used first, and reassign those uses to your regular "Normal" style, etc. . Nisus will tell you, if you try to delete a style that is actually used somewhere. Just remember that one type of "use" is as either a "Based on" or a "Next style". So there may not be any text in your document containing that style directly, and still Nisus tells you the style is "in use".

As for "List styles", it's probably best to think of them as not really styles at all. They are really "list attributes". You can attach some formatting attributes to the lists, but it's probably best to avoid doing this. On the other hand you can attach list styles to paragraph styles. In fact in order to get consistent formatting of lists, I would recommend creating a paragraph style, attaching the list style, and all the relevant formatting to the paragraph style. That paragraph style in turn should be "based on" the type of paragraph you will want your list to match with (perhaps the "Normal" style).

One of the most typical scenarios is for headings. You can attach a list style to your "Heading 1" style and then all "Heading 1" paragraphs will be numbered (make sure the "Keep Numbering across Document" is set correctly for the relevant list style.). "Heading 2" will inherit the same numbering from "Heading 1" except that you need to set it to use the second level of the list style, etc. Obviously if you don't want numbered headings you'll have to remove the list style from the definition of "Heading 1".

mhackney wrote:

From a best practices perspective, is it best to use the Normal style for the body text and redefine it with my font/size/style?

Unless you have your own preferred model, I would recommend using "Normal" as the base style and use it to set at least the font. Whether you want to use that directly for the body text, or have a "Body" style based on "Normal" is a bit trickier question. The common practice for books is to have the first paragraph after a heading with no indent and then following paragraphs with a first line indent. If you want to do this with automatically, you basically need two body paragraph styles. In that case it's probably better to use the indirect method with judicious "based on" and "next style" settings. Maybe something like this:

Body1 {Based-on: "Body"; Next-style:"Body"; first line setting to no indent}

Body{Based-on: "Normal"; Next-style: "Body"; first line setting to indent}

But this may be too much. I usually just use "Normal" for the body.

Author:

mhackney [ 2017-02-27 06:06:46 ]

Post subject:

Re: Lot's of formatting issues

This is exactly the kind of best practices info I was looking for! Ironically, the book I'm writing is really a best practices for 3D printing based on over a decade of helping people (like me here) go down wrong paths and/or not understand the capabilities and limits and the options on how to do things.

I figured out the paragraph background color issue, I was using the Background Color attribute and thot the Paragraph Borders and Shading Options. I inset the margins a bit and used a graded shading as you can see in the screen capture. I think it works reasonably well for what I'm trying to do. I'll revisit as you suggest when the text is complete.

I am using my Intro file that I put on Dropbox as a sandbox for experimentation. I should have thought of that before! I now have a much better understanding of lists. It's funny, I ran into the header numbering issue. I created a header with numbering. In one chapter I wanted simple sub-sub section headings without numbers and had to figure out how to do that. I simply based the un-numbered heading style on normal and styled it as needed.

I see what you mean about using a Normal with only the font defined. In fact, I use a separate font for headings so maybe having a Normal Heading with only the heading font and Small Caps defined would make sense and would be more elegant than the hack I did to get an un-numbered sub sub section heading.

Things were a lot "calmer" this weekend. I believe the paragraph-list style combination for styling lists makes a lot of sense and probably would have prevented the "number the entire document" issue I had!

Just a few best practices and life is much easier. Again, thank you and adryan.

I need to be able to have some headings numbered - chapter names, primary headings like 1. XYZ, 2. ABC. But I don't like to go deep with dot-numbers so on the next level I prefer not to have a number at all. I never (at least in this book) go deeper than that. This makes for a very clean looking table of contents and allows be to use the 3rd level heading.

----- Typical Chapter Structure -----

Chapter 1 First Chapter Title

1. Section 1 Title

2. Section 2 Title

2.1 Sub-section 1 Title

Sub-sub-section 1 title (no #)

Sub-sub-section 2 title (no #)

2.2 Sub-section 2 Title

-----------------------------------------------

All of these headings are in the same font, which is different than my body text font. Also, I,d like each of the levels styled uniquely - decreasing font size and lightening of text color.

There seem to be a number of ways to go about this and I've started to implement but I'm convinced it isn't very elegant and might lead to issues later. But I can't seem to wrap my mind around how to set up Heading Paragraph styles and corresponding levels to pull this off. It seems like this might work:

Chapter Headings: configure Heading 1 based on Heading Normal and centered, large and numbered sequentially throughout document using a new list style called Chapter Number which has the Before Text set to "Chapter".

Section Headings: configure Heading 2 based on Heading 1 and left margin aligned with smaller text and lighter color and using a new list style called Section Number that is a simple numbered list with indent Number: 1.

Sub-Section Headings: configure Heading 3 based on Heading 2 so I can reduce the font size and change the color slightly and use the Section Number list with indent Number: 2

Sub-sub-section Headings: configure Heading 4 based on Heading 3 to reduce font and change color and set List Style to "use none".

I've implemented this in my sandbox document - see screen capture. Assuming this is a reasonable approach (best practice?) I have 2 questions - see red circled areas.

There is a Tab character after the "Chapter 4" that throws off the centering with the soft return (by the way, I use a new character style for the second line to reduce the font size "the best of times"). I looked everywhere and do not see how to remover that. I *thought* the Lists Separator: would do that but it doesn't seem to.

I'd like to replace that Tab with a space or En Space but again the Lists Separator doesn't seem to do it, I can add a space after the '.' but it still puts the tab after the space.